LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
No bio...
User ID: 657
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
By 'most' I meant that most women today, engaging in this lighthearted thought experiment of throwing yourself back in time, would be perfectly content with a position of a high status women.
When men engage in this thought experiment, they rarely imagine themselves as slaves or peasants. The same can apply to women.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
They say great minds think alike.
(I didn't see your comment until after I made mine)
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
The analogy between black people and women is a false one. The historical treatment of women was vastly different to that of blacks. The idea of universal, mass oppression of women is a falsehood created by historical revisionism, something I've detailed here and on the old subreddit in the past.
Most women would live relatively happy lives as the wife of some minor Roman noble or merchant in Renassaince (in fact, framing it as 'wife of' basically plays into the framing and ignores the influence and power these women had). It's just that this doesn't match how the liberal and feminist zeitgeist thinks women should live their lives. Would it have sucked to be a poor or peasant woman in the past? Sure, but for much the same reason it would have been for a man.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
Male non-combatants/civilians are killed at far, far, higher rates than female non-combatants/civilians. I remember reading that in Afghanistan, 75% percent or so of civilian casualties were male. This even extends to children, when boys were killed at higher rates than girls comparable to that of adults.
Other commentors have made some good rebuttals but there's an obvious one missing:
The vast, vast majority of people do cannot or could not be bothered putting this much effort into nutrition. You are obviously an outlier, being an amateur athlete who seems to get some enjoyment out of monitoring your nutrition needs like a hawk. Most people cannot or do not want to do this. If you're a 'casual vegan' (in that you just eat vegan and you are not monitoring your food for nutrient content) it is incredibly easy to end up with a vitamin or some other deficiency. I've seen it happen to multiple friends and family who have gone vegan.
It is far, far easier (in fact, it's the norm) to eat a nutritionally complete diet incidentally as a non-vegan. And this is not even considering the mental energy expended on working out whether certain food is vegan in the first place, let alone the nutritional content of said food.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
We should really be asking why it took until 2014 for it to happen since this began in the 1960s.
The straightfoward and proximate answer is that it took three to four generations of academics indoctrinated with this ideology to spread sufficiently enough to reach critical mass and break into the mainstream.
This all started with radicals ending the academy in the early 70s with these newly established women's and cultural studies and other departments which were basically just set up to be progressive PR for post-civil rights era, with little actual utility. But turns out if you give a bunch of radical ideologues positions in the academy and make them untouchable by virtue of their identity and politics, they will abuse that to high hell. The students of these idealogues would go on to enter the academy themselves, growing in numbers and spreading to other departments. And then the students of those students-now-teachers. And then eventually to civil society, and eventually the public conciousness.
2014 (if we're marking it as the critical point) seem like it would be naturally be the right time if we assume a start date of the early 1970, and then a few generations of unchecked growth.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
I recommend Ross' old Deus Ex review/retrospective where he discussed various conspiracy theories in detail.
Ross is well suited to these kinds of discussions. He's the best.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
This is a pretty obvious weakman. The steelman is that Nuland being involved in an region is indictative of larger US interest and involvement in the region, of which Nuland herself is just one part of the effort. It's not like Nuland is acting by herself, a one woman agency - there are powerful USA agencies and actors as part of the foreign policy apparatus.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
I would love to hear from a Christian a compelling argument for why western civilization owes it such a great debt, but this is just not convincing.
I'm not necessarily defending the post you are replying to, but the influence of Christianity on Western civilisation is so obviously self-evident that it's hard for me to take such a proposition seriously. If anything, the burden on proof should be on the argument that Christianity isn't influential on Western civilisation or doesn't 'owe it such a great debt'. Whatever your opinion of Christianity is as a religion, the reality is that for many centuries (let's say, from 400 to 1800) Christianity was the belief system of virtually all 'Westerners' (Europeans). Even post-1800 which I'm demarcating as the point where political ideologies took centre stage and God took a backseat, Christianity still remained extremely influential. I'm not sure how you could have the primary belief system of your civilisation for centuries not be influential. The only caveat is that I would say that Western civilisation is not merely Christianity, but also the Greco-Roman tradition of 'reason'. Indeed, much of the history of philosophy of the West can be seen as attempts to reconcile the two (the most obvious example being Thomas Aquinas).
Virtually all intellectual thought during this period was intertwined in Christianity. The distinction between natural philosophy and theology was paper thin at best, really only becoming distinct magisteria (sorry Gould) during the Enlightenment. The vast, vast majority of European philosophers and thinkers were unavoidably intertwined wtih Christian theology, and even those who explicitedly avoided or criticised Christianity (e.g. Machiavelli or Spinoza) were still necessarily working in and shaped by a Christian society. Saint Augustine, Aquinas, Luther were explicitly Christian, and those like Descartes and Kant were still heavily influenced by Chrisitian (Kant (catagorical imperative) is sometimes described as trying to construct a secular reason-based version of Christian ethics to complement but not conflict with Christianity). Even those not engaged in what today we would describe as religious and theological endeavours still explicited said their goal was to study God's creation or similar. Nietziche believes that the West's development of natural science was a evitable consequence of Christianity for this reason (though it would ultimately destroy Christianity, a snake eating its own tail). Some have even described Marxism as the last 'great' Christian heresy.
Of course, we can't neglect the political consequences of Christianity and debates over Christianity. The Investiture Controversy, the Thirty Years War, both the Great Schism and the Western Schism and soon. These political consequences in turn resulted in political outcomes which further in turn resulted in further developments in political and non-political philosophy. The Thirty Years War resulted in the Peace of Westphalia, often cited as the origin of modern notions of statehood and international relations.
Liberalism and the concept of natural, individual and human rights - inventions of Western civilisation - have their clear origins in Christianity theology - we are all made in the image of God, and everyone is a sinner. This is hardly a novel argument. When the US Declaration of Independence states - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - it's not immediately obvious to an atheistic/materialist or non-Christian view how these truths are 'self-evident' but they are to a Christian worldview, it literally states men are endowed these rights by their (Christian) Creator. The speeches, personal letters etc of the US Founding Fathers basically confirm that this was their belief.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
Damn, that one mention of golf, oops
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
Just an amusing observation - you wrote reasonably long post about golf without ever once using the word golf.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
You're assuming male and female attraction is symmetrical/comparable. It isn't.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
Trade itself isn't zero-sum. That is, the very act of exchanging goods and services between mutually consenting and informed parts is not zero-sum, and is in-fact mutually beneficial.
The issue is 1) rentseeking behaviour by organisations and individuals which is self explanatory, 2) goods, particularly exotic commodities are finite, so there is competiton and an incentive to monopolise. But this doesn't change the fact that trading in of itself is mutually beneficial. Preventing someone else from trading because you traded with a third party and they did not is still a net benefit overall. You and the third party trading partner benefit. The trading competitor who was muscled out of the market doesn't lose anything except the opportunity to trade and benefit themselves, destroyed and captured ships notwithstanding.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
But if the British or Portuguese rule a territory, it means that the locals don't.
The vast, vast majority of people working in Indian colonial administration were native Indians, to say nothing of the local Rajas who had significant influence. This is generally true of all European colonial states in Africa and Asia in the 1800s onwards. In a large sense, the locals did rule themselves, even if guided by European thought and colonial administrators.
It's really only through the power of ideologies such as nationalism that to a native in Cochin/Kochi that rule from London (not matter how hands off) is illegitimate but rule from New Delhi is legitimate.
The pre-industrial world was largely a zero-sum affair
Colonialism in the context being discussed (that is, Africa and Asia reperations) is a mostly post-industral or at the very least a proto-industrial phenomeon. A bunch of Portugese trading posts scattered around Asia and Africa isn't really colonialism proper. Only in the latter part of the 1800s (as with most European powers, scramble for Africa) did Portugal really gained substantial control over what we would call colonial states (e.g. Mozambique and Angola).
Regardless, I also object to the claim that pre-industrial trading was zero-sum. It was obviously not zero-sum, or else the participants (e.g. Portugal and costal Indian kingdoms) wouldn't have participated in it! Portugal got their spices, the Indians got their silver. The actual participants in the trading mutually benefit. The fact that traders might seek to monopolise that trade doesn't change the fact that the people actually doing the trading are mutually benefiting. They're looking to gain an economic advantage over their trading competitor not their trading partner. This is no different to modern economics - the fact that some business try to monopolise or engage in anti-competitive behaviour today isn't evidence of economic activity being zero-sum!
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
The natives weren't capable of beating back the Portuguese alone, they usually had to get help from the Dutch or somebody else.
The real answer is because, generally speaking, the natives had no reason to 'beat back' the Portugese, or any other colonial state. They benefited from colonial contact, especially in the 18th century onwards. Colonial states had legitimacy and widespread local support until the mid-20th century.
It was less the natives 'getting help from the Dutch or somebody else' but more 'Europeans getting the help from the natives' to kick out their European rivals.
I thought it was pretty well known (among intellectual types who care about these things anyway) that King's views became more radical as time went on. It's not necessarily fair to equate the ideas in King's later work with that of his earlier.
Ironically, Malcolm X was the inverse, where his views became more moderate later on.
This anti-colonial argument often underpinned by a willful ignorance of how basic economics works.
Even where the Europeans (I am talking about 18-20th century Asian and African colonialism) engaged in basic resource extraction like mining (and the economies of colonies were generally far more sophisticated in reality than one might think) it still results in substainal economic development for the locals. Europeans had to build massive amounts of infrastructive to support these economic activities, to say nothing of the associated colonial administration like hospitals, schools and law enforcement. But the most important part is that the local workers were paid for their work and there was wealth flowing to the natives of the colony. The anti-colonial (typically Marxist) persective sees economy activity has necessarily zero-sum. If someone is making money, someone else must be losing money (or having their labour 'stolen'). This is obviously wrong.
Now, were these colonial economic arrangements as fair as they could have been? Maybe not, though once you factor in the expenditures on colonial administration and that colonialism generally speaking a money-losing venture for the Europeans it becomes a lot less clear.
But the counter-factual of no colonialism is that there would have been no economic development at all, and most economic activity that did exist would have continued to be conducted under local slavery (or similar economic structures) which is far less fair than the colonial arrangements.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
The question that equates economic leftist and economic liberalism and calls economic liberalism economic rightism hurts me.
Why did Americans have to ruin the word liberal.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
You have to take anything that the media was reporting on with a huge dump truck pile of salt, if they're not outright lying that is.
The biggest issue with GamerGate was that the people reporting on GamerGate, the media and journalists, especially the videogame related media, was itself the subject of the criticism. The media obviously has a huge, self-interested reason not to accurately report criticism levelled against themselves.
Who watches the watchmen, basically.
Maybe your interlocutor is a philosophical zombie.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
My personal (least) favourite is Myth 5 - "Too much detail will lead to confusion, and many people will likely not want to read a lengthy document. "
"People are too stupid to understand what they'd be voting on anyway, and if they did get the details they might cause them to vote against it!"
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
You're making the all too common mistake of conflating empathy with sympathy. Empathy means the ability to understand where someone is coming from, their persective. Understand what it's like to be in their shoes. It does not mean you have to like or agree with their perspective. That is what sympathy is for, feelings of compassion and pity with someone's position or perspective, implicited agreeing with their plight.
The ability to empathise is always a good thing, at the very least for strictly utilitarian or pragmatic reasons. By understanding someone's perspective and motivations, you can predict how they will act in certain situations. You can better manipulate people. Hostage negotiators do this all the time - they negociate with criminals, empathise with them, understand them and use that information against them. The hostage negotiators don't like the hostage takers or agree with their goals.
when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person
It certainly makes you a less effective person. If we think empathy is a necessary precursor to sympathy (while being distinct phenomena), then that lack of sympathy caused by lack of empathy certainly could be one definition of 'bad'. Being able to forgive people you like is easy. It's being able to forgive people you don't like where true virtue is found.
LacklustreFriend
37 Pieces of Flair Minimum
3yr ago
I haven't really keep up with the polling, but when I wrote the previous post about the Voice, the support for it was hovering around 50:50 (counting don't know and no together). But support was declining consistently overtime. I'm not sure how this recent development will affect support. At this stage, I think it's anyone's game.
There isn't bipartisan support. The Nationals, the smaller, regional, conservative member of the Liberal-National Coalition, has openly opposed the Voice. The Liberal Party has yet to take a position on the Voice, playing coy, and simply continuing to ask for more details. Word on the street is that there's a strong internal division in the Liberal Party over the Voice, though Peter Dutton, the Opposition Leader, clearly doesn't support the Voice for anyone who knows anything about Australian politics.
Is it a referendum on whether voters think Labor is cool
I would say it's mostly a vote de facto demonstrating how large white guilt is in Australia
The collapse of ATSIC seems like it would have soured an entire generation on the concept.
No one is talking about ATSIC. It's like it didn't exist. It's not in the public consciousness at all. Whether this is just the result of it fading from living memory or part of a deliberate effort from left-aligned media to suppress it, I can't say. You can barely find any mention of it anywhere, least of it in the mainstream media. There are a couple of throwaway mentions in a few articles, but no one is seriously criticising the Voice by making comparisons to ATSIC. I think David Littleproud, leader of the Nationals, mentioned it once in a speech recently. That's about it.
Not claiming this is necessarily representative, but look at this rubbish blog post from Monash University 'Voice to Parliament: Debunking 10 myths and misconceptions'.
Myth 6
There’s no need to enshrine the Voice in the Constitution.
By enshrining the Voice in the Constitution, it will not be able to be abolished at the whim of Parliament/the government, in contrast to ATSIC (and just about every other Indigenous advisory body set up by the government). It will also not be afraid to give frank and fearless advice. Its composition, powers and procedures will, however, be able to be amended by Parliament to ensure its effectiveness.
Yes because ATSIC was a completely corrupt and mismanaged fuckfest, as are most of these politically motivated self interested Indigenous bodies! The ability to abolish these organisations is a feature and should remain a feature it's not a bug!
Yeah, it's a real shame there's exactly zero noteworthy women who affected any political or social change before the 19th century or so. I can't think of a single one.
Yes I am being sarcastic. There are obviously plenty of women throughout history have 'done stuff', which can and does serve has historical fantasy fodder for women (assuming they want to identify with women who take on a masculine role, which liberal feminist society does want them to).
To go on a slight tangent, it's both endlessly frustrating and amusing how feminists on one hand will decry the past as an oppressive patriarchy where women were treated little more than slaves, and on the other hand constantly laud historical female figures (Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great random Viking "Valkyries" buried with their weapons etc etc) for being powerful and influential, and seeing no contradiction there.
The feminist try to patch this over this inconsistence with some post-hoc justifications, usually some just-so justification that these were exceptional women that somehow managed to break the chains of patriarchy (despite it literally being a universal phenomenon), though it's remarkable how common these 'exceptions' are. The craziest feminist explanation of this was that men occasionally allowed a very small handful of women to rise to the top as a conspiracy to better help them subjugate women... as for why women just didn't subjugate all women to begin was unclear.
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